In minority neighborhood, kids risk of cancer soars - Houston

“Like so many of their poor and working-class Hispanic neighbors, Rosario Marroquins family settled in the southeast Houston neighborhood of Manchester a generation ago because the clapboard houses were cheap, the streets were safe, transportation was convenient and downtown was only 20 minutes away.

It was an ideal neighborhood, except for the coughing spells, the nosebleeds, the burning odors and the acrid smoke.

Marroquins family, like most everyone else in the neighborhood, did their best to ignore all that, because few could afford to move anywhere else. And they tried not to notice the dozens of oil refineries, petrochemical plants and waste disposal sites expanding all around them, their towering smokestacks and huge storage tanks lining the Houston Ship Channel, the citys principal outlet to the sea.
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